In the previous Philosophy Monday we took a first stab at supporting a view of humans and advanced artificial intelligences as making choices. Today we will start to dig into the "How" part of the fundamental question:
"How should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?"
Our point of departure will be a closely related “how” question. How should we evaluate past actions whether taken by ourselves or others? To what extent were the actions good or bad? Put differently we want to form a moral judgment. To this end we will consider three aspects of an action: the action itself (e.g., lying), the motivation for the action (e.g., to protect someone innocent), and the outcome of the action (e.g., they escape). We will wind up arguing that all three of these matter, but before that we will explore arguments for focusing on only one of these exclusively.
First, consider only the action itself. There are schools of thought which argue that this is all that matters. This approach falls under a category known as Deontology, with Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative being perhaps its most sophisticated expression. Another example of this are divine command theories. Stealing is bad because God says so. It doesn't matter why you are stealing, who you are stealing from, who you are giving the goods to, and so on. Robin Hood's actions are bad because God determined them to be bad.
Second, consider only the results of the action. Another group of philosophies focuses primarily on outcomes and is referred to as Consequentialism. The best known of these is utilitarianism, developed by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham , which has a notion of utility experienced by individuals as a result of an action. It evaluates actions by how they impact that utility. Actions that increase utility are good and ones that decrease it are bad. Peter Singer has been a prominent modern advocate of this approach.
Third, consider only the motivation for the action. Virtue ethics, dating back to Aristotle, emphasizes the character and motivation of the actor. A more extreme version is found in Egoism, which says that we should see an action as good as long as it is internally motivated for our own benefit. This may seem preposterous but serious philosophers have gone down this path, including Nietzsche who wrote "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself."
Considering only one aspect is intellectually appealing in the way extremes always are: it appears much more elegant. But it is deeply flawed. Each of these approaches has its own problems which we will investigate in more detail in separate posts. Crucially though these extremes are actually at odds with the concept of choice. They all point instead to a kind of mechanical judgment: the value of an action is to be found by lookup in scripture (divine command), mathematical computation (utilitarianism), or tautology (egoism).
Any proper evaluation has to be hard work. Reality is messy. Language is compression. Our knowledge is limited. And yet we have to take motivation, action, and results into account for a proper judgment. Of course it will be really difficult. Everything apparent shortcut is really a cop out. We know this both intuitively and have also to a degree enshrined this approach in the law. Killing someone is generally bad. But motivation and results matter for what kind of crime it was, and if it even was a crime, as in the case of self defense. Martha Nussbaum refers to this complexity as "the fragility of goodness." Moral evaluation depends on multiple factors that can't be reduced to simple rules. Because proper judgment is hard work it also has to allow for being wrong. We may evaluate an action as good and later find out it had a ton of negative consequences. This inherent uncertainty in judgment connects to what Bernard Williams called "moral luck" - the way that factors beyond our control can affect the moral quality of our actions.
The plan for the upcoming Philosophy Mondays posts then is as follows. We will introduce the idea of values. We will then examine each of the three aspects of action, their associated philosophies, and the relationship to values more carefully. All of this will lead up to a more comprehensive approach to moral judgment, which can in turn form the basis for an answer to the fundamental question. Before all of that there will be another interlude.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.
